The new house is talking to me. It’s telling me to write. It’s saying, look at my epic pine trees, listen to the bucolic peace, and for fuck’s sake write something. Well I am. About 15K into a novel, which is a thing that is happening, but life is immeasurably different to six months ago, life that is here in abundance. And so is death. Nature is on display and it’s difficult not to let Mr. Horror Writer out to start describing all the crazy shit. It would be easy to give yourself over to a particularly morbid outlook with the preponderance of animal death that has become nearly a weekly occurrence. From the large to the small. From the winged to the furry.

The sheep that visited us to die slowly on the river bank. A pretty place for it to die, amongst the nettles and pine cones, where it was swiftly consumed by a variety of other creatures. From life to death. From functional to food. Until the farmer came and silently removed it.

Or the mental thrush that flew full speed at the gigantic double-glazed window in Alexis’ studio and broke its neck. We watched it gasp its final, desperate, pained few breaths and then die in the grass.

Or the bat on the floor, or the other sheep out in that field, or the Great Tit behind the wood panelling, or the Chaffinch in the flue.

Or the three dead baby blue tits. Barely formed. Stiffened egg yolk with feathers and beaks and vestigial eyes. Cast from their nest in the eaves and dashed apart on the stones beneath. But the parents returned, hatched more and we hope they survived.

Memento fucking Mori.

But nature nurtures in equal measure.

Like the gooseberry bushes growing from the ruins of an old mill building about twenty metres or so from the house. And from the same ruin, the several mature ash trees exploding up to the sky. Or the wild raspberry bushes and brambles dripping from practically every hill-road verge, poking out between hawthorn, gorse and nettle. Or the feverfew pushing up from beneath the gravel in the front garden. Or the water that rises up out of the ancient mineral-rich rock into a tank, then down a steep embankment in a pipe, across a burn, and by the action of gravity up the hill to the house.

And there is life here in abundance. And I’d happily sit and watch it all day.

The Birds.

The leucistic chaffinch. A white chaffinch with black markings. Shorn of its pigment through some genetic process.

The ubiquitous pheasant. Three of them hanging out on the bridge as I pass in the car. A couple having a natter in the middle of the road, only moving at the most leisurely of paces.

Flocks of thirty-plus small birds, unidentified as yet, but most likely youthful pheasants, or possibly youthful grouse.

Things on four legs.

Pine martens! Big fluffy beasts, roaming the countryside. Cute as hell, but will take your chickens apart if you leave the coop open.

Roe deer. Singly, in pairs or in tiny family groups, springing through the fields, or by the roadside panicked by the hurtling ton of metal that has just roared around the corner towards it.

Field mice, caught in our kitchen trap – a humane trap, I should add. Made of see-through plastic with air holes, catching Mr Mouse in the act of enjoying a pile of peanut butter. They are then repatriated to the field, across both burns and well off the road. No doubt, they just follow us back to the house the next day and have another peanut-butter-feast and imprisonment session. Cute as they are, they shit everywhere.

Bats. Not sure what type. Possibly Pippistrelles… out at deep dusk they come, from their nests under the zinc ridges on the roof, circling and diving for insects.

Foxes. A cub. Sitting in the middle of the road. Running off at the last moment. An adult, bounding long-legged through a field of knee-high grass. Just yards from the oblivious sheep.

Various scurrying smaller rodents, crossing the road. Rabbits. Hares.

Frogs. Toads big enough and horny enough to sit on one of the substantial toadstools that spore from the damp leaf-litter.

Insects.

In their hordes. Shiny carapaced beetles and multi-limbed winged things. Midgies, but the less psychotic East-coast variety. Wasps, bees and something I can only hope was a hornet, because if it wasn’t then we’re all in deep trouble.

And the best for last. Spiders. Controversial eight-legged creatures. Feared by many, but gravely misunderstood. Despite their hard work cleaning a house up of mindless little flies, many of you still see fit to expel them in jars and flick them from windowsills. Worse fates await a spider. Flattened beneath a slipper or rolled-up magazine for example.

It’s tough on the small things all round, but to watch them cling on to life through anything, to fight every moment to breathe their last, to live whatever the cost, it’s humbling and terrifying at the same time.

I’ve been excited to see the recent proliferation of horror/dark/weird fiction magazines and anthologies appearing everywhere. When I started writing in earnest in 2008 (crap, is it that long ago…?) horror markets were either rare, subsumed into fantasy, or just poor quality. I admit I was still green when it came to submitting stories, and there were certainly the likes of Black Static just kicking off, along with a few others.

Now there are many new ventures setting sail across the wide wide internet, and many of them are high profile. Weird fiction is becoming a byword for literary, experimental horror/fantasy (although that is a rather generalised definition of it) and at the time of writing you still have 11 hours left to contribute to the Indiegogo fundraiser for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, edited by Laird Barron and published by Michael Kelly’s Undertow Books. An anthology I can’t wait to get my hands on. Undertow is also responsible for the rather excellent Shadows and Tall Trees – a classy journal of literary horror containing many writers in common with Black Static, but having its own unique aesthetic and sensibilities. From next year it is changing to a yearly trade paperback, hopefully with more stories (and I must get my arse in gear and submit something).

Other zines I’ve been noticing gaining in profile are John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine. From the stable that produces Lightspeed, it contains a mixture of new and reprinted horror stories and has a nicely eclectic range of fiction.

Lamplight is a smaller, perhaps lesser-known, zine that has been going for over a year now, but is publishing some interesting names and is building a following.

Launching this autumn is The Dark, published by Jack Fisher, and the first issue contains some very impressive names. I’m glad to see they are seeking more interesting, experimental unique fiction, but still on the darker side of things.

Horror fiction went through a particular period in the 80s when it was so fashionable, with its lurid black and red book covers. And the the bottom fell out of it thanks to the market becoming over-saturated. Now there appears to be a new fashion with genre fiction and perhaps publishers are still a little reticent to call it horror. Hard to shake the negative connotations that the 80s plastered over that word. In its place has come this intelligent, literary fiction of the weird and the dark, and the horrific. It seems to be rising again, and I for one am dedicated to following this particular fashion.

Two films in the cinema recently. I know Cloud Atlas came out months ago in the US, but it was only out in the UK recently, and I caught it the other night at the end of its theatre-run.

This film was always going to be a challenge, for the film-makers and for the viewers. I’m a huge fan of David Mitchell’s novel and read it when it first came out. When I heard a film was being made, I scoffed at the idea. How on earth do you film a novel with six separate stories being told in a Russian doll structure, over several hundred years of time from a 19th century sailing ship to a far future post-apocalyptic society where everyone speaks in a pidgin language? A lot of what is enjoyable about David Mitchell’s novels is in the precise and beautiful language he engages for his prose, and I could not conceive of how such a film could be made, and how it would be enjoyable to watch.

I won’t say that I was entirely proved wrong, but the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have made a tremendously ambitious film that weaves the six storylines together in a patchwork, rather than structuring it like the novel. A bold move that both works incredibly well and at the same time doesn’t quite convey the storytelling aspect that is so clever and integral to the novel – i.e. that each subsequent character is reading about the previous story in some format (a journal, letters, a mystery novel, a film, a confession etc…). It is present in the film, but the film concentrates far more on the interconnectedness theme and takes that to an extreme conclusion.

And that is the main difficulty I have with this movie. In an attempt to make the theme of connected souls through the ages, the film utilises the same actors to play many different roles in different timelines, which turns the experience of watching the movie into an actor-spotting game, and that in turn becomes more and more of a freakshow with Tom Hanks giving some ridiculous turns (including one unforgivable Scottish Accent and a vaguely passable Irish accent), culminating in white actors being transformed into Asians through a disturbing use of make-up effects and vice-versa (although I know which one will cause the most offence). I wondered if the film would have been any less enjoyable if they had simply employed different actors in the different timelines and actually, you know, used Korean actors for the Neo-Seoul scenes. I think with the distinctive visual style for each timeline employed throughout, it wouldn’t have made any difference, although I do understand why they did it, embodying the theme in what could’ve been a potentially clever manner, but I think ultimately devolved into some quite bad ageing make-up and racist caricature.

A shame really, as the film makes a solid attempt at bringing the book to the screen, with some extremely faithful scenes and good acting from Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent in particular. I did enjoy it, was swept up in the undeniably impressive visual grandeur, was also thrilled by the clever use of cutting between timelines to create tension. At times it feels like pantomime, but it’s better than you think, and if it introduces anyone to the magnificent novel then, job done.

Trance, I saw a couple of weeks ago on its release. A new Danny Boyle film is always something to be excited about. His ability to turn his directing hand to so many different styles so successfully is outstandingly impressive. His films are always stylish, shocking and thought provoking. Trance is no different in that respect, and I found myself thinking about it and discussing it for days afterwards.

It’s a difficult film to review without spoilers, but I’ll try.

It’s a film about identity, art theft and abusive relationships, which is already saying too much. Identity is the main theme, and the film itself has identity issues, with its point of view shifting unexpectedly and characters not being what they first appear to be.

I was riveted to it from start to finish. It is a head trip of a film, with a very blurred approach to what is real and employs some deliberately shocking imagery (some of which is gratuitous – in my opinion). It’s always thrilling and beautifully put together, but…

At its heart I found it rather a cold, empty experience. Because of the way it plays with identity and reality, identifying or sympathising with any character becomes impossible. Their true natures aren’t revealed until near the end, by which time it’s too late to feel empathy for anyone and events take increasingly more ridiculous and implausible turns. The acting performances are great from everyone involved – James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson in particular – which leads me to think it’s the fault of the story. With a film that is so trippy and mysterious, we the audience need something constant to grapple onto and pull us through the rabbit hole, otherwise the style overwhelms the substance and the film loses its emotional heart.

To discuss it any further would be to ruin the plot, and I would say that it will make enjoyable second viewing as it will be an entirely different film second time around. Took me back to the atmosphere of Shallow Grave with its implausible but entertaining story and its reprehensible characters. Entertaining but hollow.

Today is World Book Day and I’ve been thinking what exactly it is about books – physical, tactile books with pages and binding and weight – that excited me so much as a kid and still does. And also, why that matters and my mixed emotions over digital publishing.

I’ve always been a part-time Luddite, resisting new technology at the same time as coveting it, but by the time I inevitably give in and buy the gadget the rest of the world has moved on. As a writer in the modern world it is impossible not to adopt the use of some technology. Even Joe Hill, who apparently still enjoys the use of a typewriter, is a regular user of Twitter. Yet, I still haven’t bought into using an e-reader of some kind, despite their now huge popularity, even though I agree with the whole saving of space and trees aspect. Something about them still turns me off, and I know I am in the minority these days and given enough time, late night whisky and itchy mouse fingers I may purchase a Kindle and be all born-again digital Messiah. By which point the rest of the world will be consuming their books via Google Glass or direct brain uploads.

The thing is, when I walk into a bookshop, or a library, like the one in the photo above (Barter Books in Alnwick) it’s the very existence of the books that thrills me. Yes, the smell, the feel etc… but also the fact that they exist. When I was four years old I used to sleep in a sectioned-off area of my mum’s bedroom (because we used to rent out the only other bedroom in the flat) that had a wall on the left and a bookshelf on the right. I still have that same bookshelf (shelves bowing and blistering with multiple paint jobs), which towered over me as a child, all six shelves of it, laden with Enid Blyton and Dr Seuss and various books that have now escaped my memory. There was a safety to them. They represented, to me, a literal barrier to the nightmares that would try and invade my sleep.

Whether it’s due to the presence of that bookcase, I don’t know, but I find physical books to be such a valuable commodity. Anyone can pick them up and read them at any time, and given even minimal protection from the elements they should survive an extremely long time. There’s a reverence inherent in people’s behaviour towards large collections of books. Hushed words and soft footsteps, and I understand that. Who wouldn’t be reverent to the time, effort and imagination that has gone into producing those words, or even just the cover artwork design.

I’m not advocating that this is how everyone should behave, and I foresee a time in the very near future when attitudes are going to change irrevocably. The advent of digital publishing has turned books into more of a throwaway commodity. A non-corporeal thing that is gone at the touch of a button (the same could be said for books at the strike of a match, yet somehow one is seen as much more iconoclastic than the other). There are people growing up now who know nothing else but a digital world, and I’m curious to be able to see through their eyes and have a sense of how they perceive books. I don’t believe for a second that this applies to all people half my age or younger, but there has to be a difference of perception there. When I was sleeping in that bed betwixt wall and bookcase, the only technology in our house was perhaps a pocket calculator. TV, radio, fridge, telephones were still operating on technology that hadn’t progressed much since before WWII. I saw the advent of personal computers from their most basic incarnations (ZX spectrum etc…), but I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to grow up in a world where the internet and mobile phones, tablets, PCs, game consoles are an everyday occurrence and taken for granted.

One of my worries is that many things in today’s society are becoming so ephemeral, gadgets replaced by the next gadget within days of release, downloads zipping back and forth, our lives played out on screens, in social media, in virtual existence. Books need to survive as a concrete collection of our gathered wisdom, folly, insecurities, successes, loves, hates and philosophies. They need to stand as a safety barrier holding back the tide of invisible information.

This is fast becoming a sermon, and I don’t intend it to be so. It is a fairly unstructured thought salad, but I felt the need to blog about it (and yes I see the irony inherent after what I’ve just been saying). Perhaps it comes down to the effects of age and hankering after an age when life seemed simpler and less cluttered with ‘noise’. I’m sure many of us go through similar feelings as we get older, quietly terrified of the new world crashing down on us like a wave and everything we valued and treasured being swept away in the tide.

Time to cap the month off with a rambling post about writing. Yes, this is a writing blog, even if I have diverged into film reviews of late (and attracted more blog traffic than ever…).

I’ve mentioned before how Autumn’s fruitful attributes often translate into writing accomplishments for me. It’s something to do with that sensation of winter encroaching, of harvesting and stocking up food – making casseroles and soups in abundance. The weather is always dramatic one way or the other. The east coast USA is currently in the jaws of Hurricane Sandy. Leaves are abandoning their branches lemming-style and I feel like I’m watching the whole thing in sped-up time-lapse photography with a suitably apocalyptic Philip Glass soundtrack layering the scene with building menace.

I find my dreams are even more fecund and bizarre at this time of the year. That may be partly due to my body battling off the annual assault of cold viruses and infections. This is also due to my writing output increasing back to old levels. I’m relatively pleased with the amount of new stories I’ve written in the last six months. And the ongoing project of completing the various first drafts and aborted attempts littering my hard drive is progressing apace. I’m still no closer to starting any of the novel ideas, although I regularly add to the growing files of notes on all of them. There are four ideas all competing for attention in the category of novel-waiting-to-be-written. Only one of them fills me with confidence that it’s a good idea, but it’s the one that will be the most research-heavy and although I’ve begun that research, I still need to read a lot more history before I can attempt it.

As a way to prepare for the sort of effort required to revise a longer piece, I hope to attempt a revision on my long-forgotten novella about chess and demonic possession, The Lempkin Variation. Hence the chess-related image above. It’s a story that’s entirely worth the effort of revision. It always has been, but I am a lazy, work-shy ne’er-do-well and have a magical bottomless bag of excuses for not doing what I should be doing. As a writer friend of mine said to me the other day in an email. –

Start finishing your stuff. I’d put money on the fact that you’re probably sitting on a pile of gems.

Best news of all, although this isn’t an official announcement yet (I’ll do that once it’s, well… official), I sold a story this morning to a really great magazine. It’s a story I only wrote in July and had only sent it one other place where it received a swift rejection. It’s a story of drug addiction, nostalgia and transcendence. I’ll have more news to follow and it will get its day in the spotlight. Bring it on, Winter.

I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions. I understand the point of them – January the 1st always has a clean, raw feeling to it, like freshly shed skin and we all emerge pale and blinking from the gigantic countdown that is New Year’s Eve. It’s a time of beginnings, of resetting clocks, of making decisions and statements of intent for the coming twelve months.

I’ve neglected this blog, and my writing, for the last six weeks or so. It seems to be a cycle I’ve been getting into this last year – bursts of activity, followed by slumps of inactivity caused by all manner of self-absorbed nonsense and lazy excuses. December is a perfect month for lazy excuses, crammed full as it is with hard work, head colds and the occasional social engagement. But then I read other writer’s blogs explaining how terrible a year they’ve had and yet they carry on writing, with regularity, and don’t complain about it.

I won’t make resolutions this year, they have a singular finality about them that makes them fragile (i.e. they are easily broken). Instead I need to have resolve, in its simplest meaning of having determination in everything I do writing-wise. Determination to finish stories that I begin writing; determination to then revise those stories/novellas/novels to the best possible draft and submit them; determination to read, for fun, research, inspiration; determination to write a novel and have it published. These are not resolutions. There are no absolutes here. I just need to have the resolve to do what I need to do at the time that it needs doing, rather than putting it off, and staring at it, and worrying about it, because I have to remember one thing.

I love writing. I love reading great writing. It gives me a thrill to get lost in a story, both creating and reading it. And I know I can do it. And isn’t that half the battle?

I’ll blame the crazy weather this month for the ping-ponging focus I’ve had on writing these last couple of weeks. This is as much of an update post as anything else. In the first days of this month the sun was frying my brain into coming up with new novel ideas and making me think I could just, you know, write them. With some perspective, I have settled back on my 22-year-old idea, ‘The Death and Life of Harrison Brodie’, as I mentioned previously.

That said, I’ve found myself in the dark, nether place after finishing writing a new short story where I’m not doing any actual writing, but am instead flying back and forth between writing notes for the novel and picking at the crumbs of short story ideas to see which one might be the tastiest. It’s not wise to spend too long in this nether place, otherwise the writing doldrums are not very far away (a place I know the landscape of all too well).

Good then that I have finally found a way forward on ‘The Last Photograph’, an idea I’ve been playing with for a while now. I’ve had the first 300 words or so for some time, but they were never quite right; never enticing enough to lead me anywhere. After chopping them up, sliding them around and stepping to the side to look at it all from a fresh angle, it is now a story I can write, and I pushed that 300 up to 450 last night. 450 that I’m happy to run with. And I’m just one more pass away from a final draft of ‘Closer to Death’, which means a 6th story into the submission queue.

Submissions have been slow and uninspiring, with four out of the five at 100 days or more. All the more reason to keep working on revisions and throw as many as possible out there.

I should be able to start the novel very soon, though. Into the stage of fleshing out characters and scenes at the moment; working out plot problems and researching stuff that needs researched – you know, the usual stuff, human decomposition, butcher’s shops, local Christian bookshops, Fife.

Ultimately, posting a word count progress for that novel idea I had was a little too bold. The idea was barely two days old, and it has a great deal of competition.

There are four ideas for novels that I have, all at differing stages of progress; all fighting for attention like the unruly brats that they are, but the one that has truly grabbed me by the face is the oldest one of the lot, and it’s not just the unnatural heatwave melting my brains.

Current working title is ‘The Death and Life of Harrison Brodie‘. I conceived the original idea about twenty-two years ago, right about the time I decided to sit down at my Olivetti typewriter and have a go at writing a novel, with little preparation. First novel I ever tried to write was a dreadful piece of comedy Science Fiction, blagged from a 2000AD ‘Future Shock’ comic story about customs officers working in a spaceport. I thought the concept of a xenophobic customs officer to be quite funny, but my execution of the story in the style of Terry Pratchett meets Douglas Adams was at best ill-advised.

At the time, I also scribbled down several ideas, all of which were for novels at the time. I hadn’t even considered the concept of short stories yet. Out of those ideas I have written one short story, which is currently on its 12th submission and has received encouraging personal rejections from places such as Asimovs and Interzone. And then I also came up with an idea for a novel involving a ghost (of sorts…), the walking dead (well, kind of…) and a butcher’s shop. After all this time it has jumped to the fore and begged to be written. I have my two main characters fully sketched out, and two nights ago I wrote a full plot synopsis in three acts. So that means, beginning, middle, end. That and many pages of notes mean this is now top contender for being written. Heck, I even have the first 200 words.

Lack of a fully fleshed out plot has been the sticking point for the other contenders so far, or characters that haven’t gone from being a name with an idea attached to becoming a real individual that I can visualise and hear and actually imagine having a life beyond the confines of the story.

There’s a passage in one of my unpublished short stories (which is currently on submission#12, but I’m still holding out hope for it) about radio static –

Static sounds the way I imagine the universe would sound if you could listen to it. A billion tiny voices all crying out for attention, but each one has dwindled to a whisper. The distant hiss of life across light years, every one craving the recognition of the other. None of them hears. It’s the loneliest sound.

And then earlier this year I wrote an Edinburgh-set horror piece called ‘Listen to the Static’, a 6000 word short story, but it’s a structurally impaired patient in need of serious rearranging. Anyway, all of this leads me to discussing an exciting new project. Borrowing the title of that short story, and some of the themes of that paragraph from my oft-rejected short story I have a new idea for a novel, which is currently usurping The Drover as prime contender for being written.

It’s nice to be excited about a big idea that has huge scope beyond being just a short story. Tonight my main character has a name, as do at least two other characters. And I’m already forming the voice in my head. In fact, I even wrote some actual words tonight to test out the voice and what I intended to be a short sentence or two became 100 words in a heartbeat. Dare I pin down the genre? If I say the words Paranormal Fantasy then my gut churns. I hate pinning the genre-tail on the story-donkey. I could simply call it horror. It has ghosts, and I fully intend to contribute to your nightmares as far as possible. Lets just call it words for the moment, and even make the bold step of starting a regular progress report, including word count and related stuff.

And no, I’m not talking about my gas/electricity bill, but a personal plan for streamlining the ideas/writing/rewriting process. It’s nothing alarmingly new, and is based purely upon advice I’ve already seen repeated a thousand times (it is possible to spend more time reading advice for writers than breathing).

After a few months of staring in quiet desperation at unfinished and unrevised stories, and at a burgeoning ideas file in need of fertilising, I seem to have found a returning passion for the craft – at last. I fished out the 3900 words of uncompleted SF story I started over two months ago and immediately found my way back into it. Three separate ideas all glowed with possibility, and I have just about reached a final draft on “Down the Back of Donald’s Couch‘, my surreal, existential horror tale about the sanctity of living room furniture and losing yourself.

So the plan is to have a three-pronged attack on the go (all until I can finally complete and prepare the research and plotting for the Drover novel).

Work up an idea into a writeable story.

Write another story.

Revise an already written story.

Simple and well-tried, but it keeps me busy and focused, and never without work. The emptiness that follows completion of a draft is often a difficult void to fill, but we’ll see if my plan can work.

And at the same time I’m enjoying the wonders of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and today will hopefully play a little street chess (and likely lose in a most humiliating manner, but it’ll be fun.)